A history of Sindh 9780195775013, 0195775015

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A History of Sindh

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

A History of Sindh

Suhail Zaheer~T,ari

Karachi

Oxford University Press Oxford

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New York 1994

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OXFORD NEW YORK TORONTO DELHI BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE HONG KONG TOKYO NAIROBI DAR ES SALAAM CAPE TOWN MELBOURNE AUCKLAND MADRID

and associated companies in BERLIN IBADAN

Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press

© Suhail Zaheer Lari, 1994 All rights reserved. No part of tl)is publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0 19 577501 1

Printed at Ghazal Printing Press, Karachi Published by Oxford University Press 5-Bangalore Town, Sharac Faisal, P.O. Box 13033, Karachi-75350, Pakistan.

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Dedicated to my father Justice Zahirul Hasnain Lari and to my mother Begum Qabila Khatun

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Contents •

Preface

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1 7 11

1 Introduction 2 Harappan Civilization 3 Pre-Muslim Period 4 Early Muslims 5 The Apbasids 6 TheSumras 7 Origin of the Sammas 8 Children of Unar 9 Children of Juna 10 Peace and-Stability 11 The Last' Samma 12 The Arghuns 13 Shah Hasan 14 The Tarkhans 15 Jani and Ghazi Beg 16 The Mughals 17 The Kalhoras 18 The Talpurs 19 British India

21 34

45 54 66

73 77 84

92 106

11 7 123 132 144 158 171 211 215 221

Selected Articles Selected Books Index

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Preface My interest in the history ofSindh dates back to the late 1970s when my wife Yasmeen Lari began documenting old buildings and towns of ~indh and I photographed them. It required some knowledge of the history of Sindh to prepare an inventory of the thousands of photographs that I took. I found that though there are a number of books on the history of Sindh, there is no one complete volume on the subject. This . volume is an attempt to fill this gap. It may also contribute to a more intelligent and meaningful discussion of the present situation in Sindh. · . I thank Hameed Aliani, Khalid Anwar, Shanul Haq Haqqi, Major Ibnul Hasan, Khalid Shamsul Hasan, Ms Rasheeda Husain, Syed Husbanallah, Raza Kazim, Dr Hamida Khuhro, Begum Majid Malik, Ms Nagin Malik, Ms Tayapa Muslim, Iqbal Nasirri, Ms Maki Qureshi, Ms Mumtaz Rashdi, Akhtar Ali Siddiqui, Dr Zaitun Umar, Dr Zarrin Ara Zardari and Wamiq Zl,lberi, for going through the various drafts of this book and for their comments. · I am grateful to Zohra Yusuf, Yasmin Qureshi and Ameena Saiyid for making this publication possible and to Shahbano Alvi for designing the covei:. I also th~nk my children·Humayun Lari, Mihail Lari and Raeena Lari for their help.

Suhail Zaheer Lari 13November1993

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1 Introduction Before the Arab conquest of Sindh, the traditional history, the itihasa, began with the mythical King Manu, the Aryan man, who survived the great flood that destroyed all life on earth and became the progenitor of a new race. The Puranas tell us that the god Vishnu, who is the preserver of life on earth, forewarned King Manu of this flood and directed him to gather together his family, the seven sages, the essence and seeds of all living creatures, and build a boat for them. When the floods came, Vishnu took the form of a homed fish and the serpent god appeared as a rope. Vishnu tied the boat to his horn with the rope and towed it to the safety of the highest mountain peak. The boat and its passengers remained there till the floods receded. The descendants of the eldest of the nine sons of Manu established the solar and lunar royal dynasties that ruled Aryavarta - the land of the Aryans between Delhi and Patna, the capital of the Indian province of Bihar. These royal cousins fought a great war, the Mahabharata, on the field of Kurukshetra, north of Delhi in 3102 BC, which marks the beginning of Kali Yuga, the Hindu Age of Misfortune. The story of this war i$ told in the longest single poem in the world, called Mah~bharata, that was composed between 400 BC and AD 400. According to the Mahabharata, Jayadratha, the Prince of Sindh, fought in the great war side by side with the Aryan aristocracy that considered the Indus valley to be the. land

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of the impure, the melechchas. Jayadratha explains in the Mahabharata that he belonged by birth to the seventeen high clans and was married to the only daughter of the blind Prince Dhritarashtra, the father of one hundred sons called the Kauravas, of Hastanapur (Meerut). The attempt by the Kauravas to expel their cousins, the five brothers called the Pandavas, from lndraprastha (Delhi), resulted in the great war. Jayadratha abducted Draupadi, the Panchala princess and common wife of the broth.ers Pandavas, from their forest home when her husbands were out hunting. The Pandavas hearing the cries of Draupadi, pursued Jayadratha, defeated his army, recovered their wife and captured Jayadratha, but spared his life. Jayadratha remained unrepentant and led a large army from Sindh in support of his brothers-in-law in the great war aga'inst the Pandavas. During the war, Jayadratha killed Abh~manyu, the young son of the Pandava brother Arjuna from his personal wife Subhadra, in an 'unfair fight' (Mahabharata, Drona Parva, Chapter Ill, verse 6). When Arjuna returned to his camp that night and heard the news of the death of his son, he vowed to kill Jayadratha before the sun set on the new day. Jayadratha was terrified and wanted to run away but was comforted by the Kauravas who hid him in the rear of their army. But Arjuna found and killed Jayadratha with the help.of his brother-in-law, the god Krishna, who threw a veil over the sun to lull the Kauravas into the belief that with the setting of the stu1, the danger of Arjuna fulfilling his vow of killing J.ayadratha, had passed. The Muslims rejected this version of ancient Hindu history ~s mythology, because they believed in the story of the great flood described in the Holy Quran:

Because of their sins They were drowned (In the flood), And were . made to enter

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INTRODUCTION

The Fire (of Punishment): And they foundIn lieu of GodNone to help them. And Noah said: 'O my Lord! Leave not Of the unbelievers, A single one on earth! 'For, if Thou dost leave (Any of> them, they will But mislead Thy devotees, And they will breed none But wicked ungrateful ones. (71.25-27) . (Ali, 1934, 1617)

So We inspired him (With this message): 'Construct The Ark within Our sight And under Our guidance: then When comes Our command, And the fountains of the earth Gush forth, take thou on board Pairs of every species, male And female, and thy familyExcept those of. them Against whom the Word Has already gone forth: And address Me not In favour of the wrong-doers; .For they shall be drowned (In the Flood).'. (23.27) (Ali, 1934, 879)

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A HISfORY OFSINDH

The Muslims, like the Jews and Christians before them, believed that the Prophet Noah (Nuh) and his family were the only survivors of the great flood that God sent to destroy the world, and that the people of South Asia are descendants of Ham, the youngest of the three surviving sons of the Prophet Noah. The first two sons of Ham were Hind and Sindh. The Muslims when they came to India also rejected the Hindu view that the world had been in existence for four million years. Instead, they asserted that it came into existence with Adam seven thousand years ago (Farishta, 1623; 60). These views of history were challenged in the eighteenth century by Western scholars of Sanskrit. Governor-General Warren Hastings (1774-85) who knew Persian, Urdu and Bengali, encouraged Sir William Jones,_ a judge of the Supreme Court at Calcutta, to study Sanskrit and establish the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 'for inquiring into the history, civil and natural, the antiquities, arts, sciences, and literature, of Asia'. Sir William Jones was familiar with all the major European and Asian languages including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Turkish. His study of Sanskrit led him to conclude that Sanskrit was related to the European languages. After this important breakthrough, it was not long before Western scholars were able to suggest, on the basis of evidence provided by philology and archaeolog:', that Sanskrit and the European languages had their origin in the language of a people who spoke Indo-European languages and lived in the great Eurasia}l steppeland and migrated to Iran, India and Europe c. 1500 ec. In 1901, the traditional view of history was further challenged when the viceroy Lord Curzon ordered that the Archaeological Survey of India be reorganized and expanded, and a young archaeologist, John Marshall, was appointed Director-General. The systematic excavations under the direction of Marshall in the 1920s, at Harappa in ~unjab and Moenjodaro in Sindh, revealed the existence

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INTRODUCTION .

of a pre-Aryan civilization dating back to c. 3000 BC. Recent excavations by a French team at Mehrgarh in Bal0chistan has extended the history of neolithic settlements to c. 8000 BC. The people of Sindh noticed the mounds of the past settlements around them, but had no real knowledge of the pre-Muslim people or their culture till the archaeologists did their pioneering work of excavation. This was because the people of the Aryan civilization who replaced the people of the Indus civilization, were not literate. This has left many gaps in the history of Sindh as our knowledge of Sindh is dependent on what others have written in their language during their period of contact with this region. Although Makli is the largest necropolis in the world and has· some of the most beautiful calligraphy in stone and on tiles spanning over three centuries, it contains no inscription in the Sindhi language. The languages used for writing in Sindh were Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian, because Sindh was dominated at various times by people who spoke these languages or had adopted them as the language of the state. Whereas the Brahmi script is believed to have been introduced in South Asia around the eighth century BC through maritime trading contacts with middle eastern seafarers, the Kharoshti script is believed to have developed in the area which is now Pakistan, in around the fifth century BC, under the Persians who used the Aramaic script as the official language of their empire. However, neither of the two scripts were found adequate for writing Sanskrit till a new script called Devanagari (Script of the City of Gods), was perfected during the Gupta period around the fourth century AD. Devanagari became the exclusive script for writing Sanskrit and all previous scripts were forgotten, and with it the history of previous periods was also lost till modem times. Thus, when the Asoka rock and· pillar inscriptions were discovered, no Indian scholar was found capable of

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reading it. Therefore, James Princep, the Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, undertook the task of deciphering it. Western, and later Western trained scholars and archaeologists, built up a knowledge of pre-Muslim history from old inscriptions in forgotten languages. They also collected in , institutions, like the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the writings of people who had visited or ruled over Sindh, and translated them into English. This was necessary as the oral traditions and living history had been lost with earlier families, clans and dynasties who had repeatedly been replaced in Sindh by new peoples.

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2 Harappan Civilization The Harappan civilization (as this newly discovered civilization is called by archaeologists, because it was first discovered at Harappa in Punjab) roughly covered the area of Pakistan and extended in the south and east to the Gujarat, Rajasthan and Hariana provinces of India and in the west to Afghanistan. So far archaeologists have located over one thousand Harappan sites extending over one million sq. km. This renders the Harappan civilization more extensive than any other known civilization of the Bronze Age. Another name given to the Harappan civilization is the Indus Valley civilization. But out of over 1,000 sites that have been discovered so far, very few are located in close vicinity of the Indus river system. It may be that a number of them lie buried under the silt deposited by annual inundations. According to the German expert Michael Jansen, however, the most proba.ble reason is to be found in the nature of the Indus river which exhibits extreme annual fluctuation (the volume of water in the Indus in summer can be sixteen times greater than in winter). This lack of a constant water table did not favour systematic irrigation and cultivation. Further, the course of the Indus was more erratic than the courses of the world's other major rivers. It spanned approximately 150 km which transformed the lower part into an immense swamp during the rainy seasons, till the British undertook their

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great drainage and irrigation schemes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tamed the Indus river system. The areas suitable for irrigation, cultivati.o n and settlement of farming communities were the smaller river systems. The.refore the settlements of the Harappan civilization were located away from the Indus river system. They were towards Balochistan on the west, and India in the east, till the Harappan people made the revolutionary decision in c. 2500 BC to build Harappa and Moenjodaro according to a preconceived plan, as central urban places, to exploit the river Indus for communication and trade. Administratively, this linked the settlements of the Harappan civilization on either side of the Indus through a network of water transport which was the most feasible means of transport in an area that turned into an inland sea during rains and floods. It also allowed the Harappan civilization to expand along the sea coast towards the Persian Gulf on one side, and the Deccan on the other. While most cities in history have tended to evolve from small agricultural settlements, this was not the case with Moenjodaro which was neither founded by, nor intended for farmers. The ground-plans of the houses were not designed to meet the requirements of a farm community, nor was the city planned for accessing wheeled traffic. The citadel area in Moenjodaro was constructed on a gigantic seven metre high man-made mud-brick platform measuring 400x200 metres. Using this platform as a foundation, further platforms were built on top in order to elevate structures of special significance such as the Great Bath. The highest raised buildings stood about twenty metres above the surrounding plains. While there are many examples in history of artificially raising a particular structure to emphasize its importance, like the ziggurats in Mesopotamia, the raising of a whole sector of a city covering more than 80,000 square metres is unique to the Harappan culture during its mature phase.

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HARAPPAN CIVILIZATION

The main element of Harappan architecture is the burnt brick which was used in the foundations of bu~ldings as a substitute for stone. It was also used in the construction of water-related structures such as wells, bathing facilities and drains. The cylindrical brick-lined wells were probably invented at the time of the construction of Moenjodaro because they have not been found in either early or preHarappan settlements. Jansen estimates that there were 700 wells within the city of Moenjodaro and that it had a sophisticated drainage system which has not been rivalled till modern times. The most remarkable feature of Moenjodaro is the absence of a wide range of industries of importance to the life of its inhabitants. German and Italian studies have shown that the crafts that were practised in Moenjodaro related to luxury goods and administrative implements. This makes us conclude that Moenjodaro controlled a system of external settlements engaged in the production of primary commodities with which they kept Moenjodaro in constant supply. There was a desperate need for Moenjodaro to trade as it had few natural resources apart from clay and water. This led to the emergence of Harappan settlements along the Balochistan coast in the west and the Indian coast in the south. It was earlier thought that Harappa and Moenjodaro were built as twin capitals of the Harappan empire, but recently two other sites as important as these two have been discovered at Kalibangan and Lothal in India. Further, the majority of the known sites of the Harappan civilization have been found to the east of the Indus along the Inda-Pakistan border which has led archaeologists to speculate that the administrative core of the civilization was somewhere in the Bahawalpur desert, and that the Harappan civilization came to an end due to the drying up of the Saraswati river which once ran along the IndoPakistan border.

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However, the earlier theory was that the thirty-eight skeletons recovered from different parts of Moenjoda.ro tell a pathetic story of sudden and violent death which shows that the city was abandoned suddenly leaving no one to take care of the injured and dead. And that the skeletons provide evidence that five out of six types of people who now inhabit the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent were already present in Moenjodaro; namely, the Negrito, Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid, Mediterranean and Western Brachycephalous. This is also supported by the evidence of sculpture found at these sites. The famous dancing girl· has the physical features of the Proto-Australoid people, whereas the Priest King has the physical features of the Mediterranean people. The Harappans were a literate people. About 3,500 specimen of the script of the Harappan people have been found inscribed on seals, amulets and other objects, but the inscriptions are very short comprising on an average of no more than five signs. Therefore the language of the Harappan people has remained unread and there does not appear to be any possibility of deciphering it unless further excavations unearth ·longer inscriptions, or a bilingual text is discovered like the Rosetta stone in Egypt. Till then we have only the evidence of archaeology which tells us that Harappan cities were abandoned in c. 1500 BC.

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The Pre-Muslim Period We have become ·so used to a settled life that we do not realize that man has spent most of his time on earth as a migrant, driven by nature and by fellow men. A study of deoxyribonucleic acid (or DNA, the genetic blueprint of people) has shown that all people alive today are descended from a woman who lived in Africa 140,000 years ago. Her desce~dants started migrating north out of Africa 75,000 years ago and spread all over the world. The Ice Age that · depleted the oceans provided man the opportunity to reach the far continents of Australia and the Americas by land. His early life as a hunter kept man on the move, in daily search of food, with no permanent home. As a pastoral nomad of the Eurasian steppes, he spent his life on horseback, following his sheep and cattle from one grazing ground to the next. Tribes or groups of tribes of these nomads had been infiltrating into Sindh with their women and children, flocks and herds, destroying and displacing everything before them. The history of Sindh, as revealed by the new western sciences . of archaeology, philology and numismatics, is one of invasion, occupation and populating of Sindh by people originating from outside Sindh and the destruction and displacement of earlier civilizations and peoples. Whereas the Himalayas formed an effective barrier against large-Scale migration from the north, the mountain ranges ended to the north of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan,

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allowing large-scale migration through Sistan and Khurasan into the Indus Valley. It placed Sindh on the most convenient route of mass infiltration into South Asia. The first great wave of nomads to overrun Sindh were the Aryans in c. 1500 BC. They introduced iron, and used camels and horses for transport. Their use of horse drawn war chariots made them a superior military force allowing them to move quickly to subdue all of present day Pakistan. The Indus script as well as the manufacture and use of seals and female figurines disappeared. The rigid system of weights and measures introduced by the Harappans did not remain in use. The uniformity of the Harappan period was replaced with distinct regional development. Pottery and metal artefacts began to reflect close ties with people living in Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. Sindh was also repeatedly occupied by the empirebuilders from the north and west who wanted to gain access to trade routes that linked the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, as well as by those who were running away from the persecution of empire-builders and looking for a place of refuge. The first such people to enter Sindh were the Medes (Mada, Mahat), an Indo-European people who had settled in Medea, south-west of the Caspian Sea in c. 1000 BC. They were the first of the peoples subject to Assyrian imperialism, who had succeeded in securing their independence by defeating the Assyrians and destroying their capital Nineveh in 612 BC. The Medes had established an empire that in the seventh-sixth century BC included modem Iran and extended up to the Indus river in the east and modem Turkey and Syria in the west. The Medes were defeated and their capital Ecbatana (Hamadan in modern Iran) was captured in 550 BC by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenian dynasty of Pars (Greek Persis and modem Fars). The inscription ?n the tomb of the Achaemenian King, Darius I declares, 'I am Darius, the Great King, King of Kings (Shahan Shah), King

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of land peopled by all races, for long king of this great earth, the son of Vishtasp (Hystaspes), the Achaemenian, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan descent'. The inscription also declares Hindu to be a satrapy (province) of the Achaemenian empire. The Persians replaced the letter 'S' of the Sanskrit word 'Sindhu' for river with 'H' and the Greeks with 'I'; therefore, Sindhu became Hindu to the Persians and India to the Europeans. The ancient Greek historian Strabo considered the river Indus to be the boundary of India proper and Arrian stated that the river Indus established the ea$tern boundary of both the Assyrian and Median empires. According· to the Greek historian Heredotus, in 519 BC, Darius I, who was the discoverer of the greater part of Asia, 'Wishing to know where the Indus (which is the only river save one that produces crocodiles) emptied itself into the sea, ... sent a number of men, on whose truthfulness he could rely, and among them Scylax of Caryanda,' to organize a fleet on the Kabul river and sail down the river Indus. The fleet arrived at the Sindh coast thirteen months later and took another seventeen months to reach Egypt. After this voyage was completed, Darius annexed Sindh ' ...and made use of [the] sea in those parts' (Heredotus, Book IV; Chapter 44). The Achaemenian used Aramaic as the official script all over their empire. This gave birth to the oldest known Pakistani script, which the Persians referred to as KharWashti, i.e., sound of the lips of the donkey or simply Kharoshti, i.e., noise. The Macedonian King, Alexander the Great, defeated the last Achaemenian King of Kings, Darius III, at the battle of Gaugamela on 1 October, 331 BC, and marched with his army through the provinces of the Persian empire to ensure their submission, and annexed them to his empire. Alexander partially repeated the feat of Scylax by sailing from the Jhelum in October 326 BC for the river Indus with an armada of about 2000 boats. 'Alexander

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fancied at this time that he had discovered the source of the Nile, his reasons being that he had, on a previous occasion, seen crocodiles in the Indus, and in no other river except the Nile, and· had also observed a kind of bean like the Egyptian bean growing on the bank of Acesines, \\'.hich, he was told, flowed into the Indus. His notion was that the Nile (under the name of Indus) rose somewhere in that part of India and then flowed through a vast desert tract, where it lost its original name and received that of Nile from the Ethiopians and Egyptians at the point where it began to flow through inhabited country again, ultimately debouching into the Mediterranean.' (Arrian, Book Six; 301). Sindh at that time was divided .i nto several nation states. Even before Alexander had reached Sindh, Sambus of Sindimana (prob~bly Sehwan) had sent envoys to seek the support of Alexander. against Musicanus who ruled over northern Sindh. Alexander's invasion of Sindh by land and river w·as· conducted with such speed that Musicanus had no option but to submit to Alexander who visited his capital, probabJy ·Alor, and ordered it to be fortified and garrisoned to provide a control centre for the region (Arrian, Book Six; 15.7). On learning that Musicanus had been received with favour and confirmed in his princedom by Alexander, Sambus fled and his capital Sehwan surrendered to Alexander. Believing resistance in Sindh to have come to an end, Alexander detached a large column of his veterans under the command of Craterus and a·substantial number of other troops, and the entire elephant corps, a'nd sent them directly west over the _M ulla pass to Persia. The people of Sindh who had earlier subrrµtted without resistance, found in this an opportunity to overthrow the Greek yoke. Alexander acted swiftly and mercilessly; the towns that rebelled were razed to the ground and 80,000 inhabitants were massacred. His general, Peitho, cap.tured Musicanus and crucified him and his advisers in his capital, as an example to others.

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THE PRE-MUSLIM PERIOD

The terror of this action was such that when Alexander reached the city of Patala at the head of the Indus delta in the middle of July 325 BC, he found that it had been abandoned en masse by its people and its ruler. Alexander built docks, fortified the harbour at Patala, explored both the principal arms of the Indus and entered the ocean to offer sacrifice to the sea gods. Alexander came to the conclusion that his fleet should leave by the eastern branch which entered a large saline lake before flowing into the ocean. However, as soon as Alexander had left with his · land force, the Patalenes returned and attacked the fortifications built by the Greeks. Admiral Nearchus, therefore, decided to take the fleet through the shorter western route in early October 325 BC, instead of getting embroiled .i n a land war which could delay his departure and disrupt the planned meetings with Alexander along the coast. Despite the hurry, the planned meeting could not take place, and Alexander's army, like· that of the Assyrian Queen Semiramis before him, suffered greatly from thirst and hunger along the coast of Balochistan. The remains of Alexander's army arrived in Karmania in February 324 BC. Alexander died the following year in June 323 BC at Babylon near modern Baghdad. Alexander had handed over the territories that he conquered in Punjab to Porus, and appointed Peitho, son of Agenor, governor over all the land south from the junction of the Indus and Acesines (Chenab) to the sea and the whole coastal region of India. When Peitho was appointed governor of Gandhara in 321 BC, Porus extended his rule over Sindh down to the sea. Kautiliya Chanakya, the author of Arthshastra, the famous book on state

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In AH 1242/ AD 1826, Mir Sobdar, son of late Mir Fatah Ali, rebelled against his uncles, along with his chief adviser Hosh Muhammad Habshi. Mir Murad Ali opened the state purse to those who would defect. Mir Sobdar's army dwindled from 8,000 to 1,200 men in one day, and the revolt ended. Meanwhile Sayyid Ahmad, a nineteen year old officer in the army of the Nawab ·of Lucknow, had arrived in Delhi from Rai Bareilli in 1806. He enrolled as a student of Shah Abd al-Aziz. Having completed his studies, he joined the army of the Nawab of Tonk but when the Tonk state lost its independence to the British, Sayyid Ahmad left and went for pilgrimage to Mecca. He returned with plans to fulfill the dream of Shah Abd al-Aziz with the help of Sayyid Ismail and Abd al-Hye, the nephew and son-inlaw of Shah Abd al-Aziz. Sayyid Ahmad and Sayyid Ismail arrived in Sindh in AH 1242/ AD 1826 with their Indian Muslim Mujahidin volunteers to fight the Sikhs. The Mujahidin were not allowed to enter the fortified towns of Sindh and word was spread that they were British agents, to create a feeling of hostility against them among the ordinary folk. Pir Sibghat Allah Vilayati who had met Sayyid Ahmad at Mecca and had sworn allegiance to him, was with the Talpur Mirs at Hyderabad. Through his intercession Sayyid Ahmad was allowed to enter Hyderabad with a few of his companions, and to say Friday prayers with the Mirs. The Talpurs allowed the Mujahidin to pass through their territory into Bal.ochistan oh their way to Afghanistan to persuade the Afghans to fight the Sikhs. On the way, the Mujahidin were welcomed by Pir Sibghat Allah Shah, son of Pir Muhammad Rashid, at Kingri. He promised them volunteers to fight the Sikhs but. the differences between the thirteen Rashdi brothers, did not allow his volunteers to join the Mujahidin. The volunteers sided with Pir Sibghat Allah Shah who named them Hurs after the famous Hur who had sided with Imam al-Husain at

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Karbala and had been killed defending him. The Mujahidin began their infiltration of the Sikh state in November 1826, from Afghanistan and occupied Peshawar in 1830. Sayyid Ahmad and Sayyid Ismail were killed fighting the Sikhs at Balakot on 6 May 1831. After their death, the struggle was continued by fresh volunteers from India and their Pathan supporters. The Mujahidin forces were finally destroyed by the British military campaign in 1863. Mir Karam Ali died in AH 1244/ AD 1828. He was the first Talpur to be buried in Hyderabad. Mir Murad Ali, the last of the four brothers, took the place of his brother but died three years later in AH 1249 I AD 1833. After his death, the territories over which he had ruled was jointly ruled by a second group of four rulers who jointly ruled from Hyderabad. They consisted of Mir Nur Muhammad and Mir Muhammad Nasir, sons of Mir Murad Ali, Mir Muhammad, son of Mir Ghulam Ali, and Mir Sobdar, son of Mir Fatah A.Ii. However the eldest, Mir Nur Muhammad was considered as chief of them all. Similarly, the territory of the Khairpur Talpurs was jointly ruled by two sons, Rustam and Ali Murad and three nephews, Muhammad Hasan, Muhammad and Nasir, sons of Mir Sohrab. And the territory of the Mirpur Talpurs was divided among the three sons of Mir Ali Murad, namely Sher Muhammad, Shah Muhammad and Khan Muhammad, who jointly ruled in Mirpur. · On hearing of the death of Mir Murad Ali in 1833, Shah Shuja, the deposed Afghan King occupied Shikarpur. T·he Talpurs organized an army of 18,000 and attacked the Afghan army which consisted of a few thousand men but were repulsed and fled. The Talpurs now sent Agha Ismail Shah to negotiate with Shah Shuja who agreed to leave on payment of 1.2 million rupees. The money was immediately provided and Shah Shuja went back to Ludhiana in Indian Punjab. In AH 1252/AD 1836, the British decided to install Shah

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Shuja on the Afghan throne. The reason for th.is action can be best understood in terms of the arguments presented by the British Prime Minister Palmerston who said that if Russia could alarm the British in India by moves in Persia, why should not the British in India alarm the Russians by moves in Afghanistan? Afghanistan and Sindh had become part of the global strategy pursued by the imperial powers. The British who were now masters of all the land east of the Indus river system, like the Mughal Emperor Akbar before them, considered Afghanistan as the first line of defence of their empire in India and wanted the rulers of Sindh to support their enterprise in Afghanistan. Colonel Pottinger of Kutch was deputed to go to Sindh to request the Talpurs to help the British armies in their passage through Sindh. Whereas the ruler of Bahawalpur and the Khairpur Talpurs co-operated and allowed the Bengal army to enter Sindh through Bahawalpur on its way to Quetta and Kandahar, Colonel Pottinger was pelted with stones in the streets of Hyderabad. A large quantity of provisions for the British army that had been collected by the Hindu traders was plundered. When the British ship Wellesley approached Karachi in February 1839, the Talpur gunners posted at Manora fired their guns. The British ship promptly fired back and levelled the seaface of the fort to the ground and occupied Karachi. The Talpurs who were under threat from both Ranjit Singh and Shah Shuja, signed a treaty whereby they agreed to pay an indemnity of 2.3 million and an annual tribute of five hundred thousand. They accepted the British occupation of Karachi and appointment of a Resident at Hyderabad. They also agreed to provide transport to the British army at a reasonable price and maintain the purity of their rupee. 'The assistance which the Mirs secretly withheld was cordially supplied by Hindus who had no cause to love them' (Aitken, 1907; 124). The British Indian army that invaded Afghanistan consisted of 9,500 men of the Bengal army which took the

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land route through Bahawalpur and Sindh, and 5,600 men of the Bombay army which arrived in Sindh by sea. Afghanistan was conquered and Shah Shuja entered Kandahar on 25 April 1839 and Kabul on 7 August 1839. While columns of the Bengal army stayed on to mop up the Afghan resistance, the Bombay army returned the way it had come. On their way back they took punitive action against the Nawab of Kalat who had failed to accept the British terms. Mihrab Khan, the Nawab of Kalat, was killed in action on 13 November 1839, and was replaced with Shah Nawaz. The towns of Shal, Mastung and Kachchi were taken from Kalat and handed over to the Afghans. In Sindh the possession of cities on the northern route to Afghanistan, like Shikarpur and Bhakkar, and the southern port city of Karachi were retained and pressure was mounted on the Talpurs to accept the British suzerainty. The Talpurs had survived so long because the British had hoped to install a friendly government in Afghanistan. After Shah Shuja was assassinated in Kabul in April 1842, the British were under no obligation to accept the Afghan claim over Sindh founded on an agreement imposed by the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah on the Mughal King Muhammad Shah. The British, as agents of the Mughal Emperor in Delhi, were in a position to make their own claim over the whole of the Indian sub-continent. Mir Nur Muhammad died in AH 1255/ AD 1840, and was buried next to his father. In 1842, Sir Charles Napier was posted as the British Resident in Sindh. He, like the Mughal general, Khan Khanan before him, was an outright imperialist. He believed, as Khan Khanan did in 1590, that the situation on the western border of the Indian empire required that Sindh must be brought under the imperial rule. Despite opposition from those in the company service -who thought that Sindh would be a financial burden, a new treaty was submitted to the Talpurs that required that (1) the coins of Sindh should bear the name of the King of England, (2) The Talpurs should cede Karachi,

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Shikarpur, Sabzall